Sublime

It never did to compare your wife and your mistress, because your wife always won, the way the classics were better, the way the jazz standards had nuances no other songs had. Still, those pop ditties of the moment could sometimes get stuck in Hood’s head. Sometimes they articulated a whole season of trouble at the office. Sometimes they articulate

and she walked through the world as if she were alone, as if she might always be alone.

“Yes but not for long. Poor Scott. Terribly black-ass. He’d come to collect some things he’d left in storage.” “Was he with Zelda?” “No, he had to put her somewhere for safekeeping. He was feeling bereft and sorry for himself, and for her. We were having dinner at the Closerie. ‘Just imagine,’ he said, ‘ten years ago we were the Golden Girl and her

That Thomas had worked for the Chronicle since 1976 was easily established, as was the fact that he’d published three brief novels since that date. Out of a sense of delicacy Carleton never mentioned that he owned all three of these, and found them elegant and elliptical, couched in prose that had the cadence of the King James Bible, and concerned

Bruce is not the kind of man I usually go out with. He’s married, not tall, when I reach him he pays for my diet Coke with the change he kept from me for parking.

Then she thought about an American author who had written that loneliness is like starvation, you don’t realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat.

Susan had a corner two-bedroom, two-bath apartment with a screened porch facing the Everglades. There was eggshell wall-to-wall carpet throughout the apartment, except for the kitchen, which had a linoleum floor in a white brick pattern.

I didn’t want to go home. My wife was different than she used to be, and we had a six-month-old baby I was afraid of,